cinema and digital medialev manovich[1]

8/12/2019 Cinema and Digital MediaLev Manovich[1]

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19/08/10 10:55Lev Manovich | Essays : Cinema and Digital Media

Pgina 1 de 4http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema-zkm.html

PUBLISHED IN: PERSPECTIVES OF MEDIA ART,

JEFFREY SHAW AND HANS PETER SCHWARZ (eds). Cantz VerlagOstfildern, Germany, 1996.

---------------------------------------Lev Manovich

Cinema and Digital Media

1. Cinema Gives Birth to a ComputerLet us reverse a well-known wisdom: that a modern digital computer isa typical war time technology developed for the purposes of calculationand real-time control and that its current use to create moving images isa rather specialized and recent application. Not only were computersused to create moving images within a few years of their "birth" but, infact, the modern digital computer was born from cinema.

What is cinema? If we believe the word itself (cinematographmeans "writing movement"), its essence is recording and storingvisible data in a material form. A film camera records data on film; afilm projector reads it off. This cinematic apparatus is similar to acomputer in one key respect: a computer is controlled by a programstored externally in some medium. Therefore, it is not acidental that adiagram of the Universal Turing Machine looks suspiciously like a filmprojector. In fact, the development of a suitable storage medium and amethod for coding data represent important parts of both cinema andcomputer pre-histories. As we know, the former eventually settled ondiscrete images recorded on a strip of celluloid; the latter -- whichneeded much greater speed of access as well as the ability to quickly readand write data -- on storing it electronically in a binary code.

So why was the digital computer born from cinema?

1.1. Jacquard Loom Around 1800 J.M. Jacquard invented a loom which wasautomatically controlled by punched paper cards. The loom was used to

weave intricate figurative images, including Jacquard's portrait. Thisspecialized graphics computer inspired Charles Babbage in his work onthe Analytical Engine, a general computer for numerical calculations.As Ada Augusta, the daughter of Lord Byron and the first computerprogramer, put it, "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patternsjust as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." [1]

Thus, a programmed machine was already synthesizing images

even before it was put to process numbers.

2.1. Zuse's Film Even more interesting is the case of Konrad Zuse. Starting in 1936and continuing into the Second World War, Zuse had been building acomputer in the living room of his parents' apartment in Berlin. Zuse'scomputer pioneered some of the basic ideas of computing: binaryarithmetic, floating decimal point and program control by punchedtape. For the tape, he used discarded 35 mm movie film. [2]

One of these surviving pieces of film shows the abstract programcodes punched over the original frames of some interior shot. Theiconic code of cinema is discarded in favor of the more efficient binary

one. In a technological remake of the Oedipal complex, a son murdershis father. But the story has a new twist -- a happy one. Zuse's film withits strange superimposition of the binary over iconic anticipates the


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process which gets underway half a century later: the convergence of allmedia, including film, to digital code. Cinema and computer -- theJacquard loom and the Analytical Engine -- merge into one.

2.2. Digital MediaThis story can summarized as follows. A modern digital

computer is developed to perform calculations on numerical data moreefficiently; it takes over from numerous mechanical tabulators and

calculators already widely employed by companies and governmentssince the turn of the century. In parallel, we witness the rise of modernmedia which allow the storage of images, image sequences, sounds andtext in different material forms: a photographic plate, a film stock, agramophone record, etc. The synthesis of these two histories? Thetranslation, which is taking place today, of all existing media intonumerical data accessible for the computers. The result: digital media --graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces and text which becomecomputable, i.e. simply another set of computer data.

If before a computer would read in a row of numbers outputtinga statistical result or a gun trajectory, now it can read in pixel values,blurring the image, adjusting its contrast or checking whether itcontains an outline of a gun. The iconic -- Barthes's famous "message

without a code" -- finally became securely codified. (It is interesting thatimage processing and semiotic analysis of iconic signs both develop atthe same time -- the second half of the 1950s.) And while the numericcoding of an image did not, of course, fulfill the semiotic desire todivide an image into units of meaning, it did come just at the right timefor the enormous economic, ideological and military interests alreadydependent on the instrumental use of the visible and therefore lookingfor a more efficient way for it to be recorded, stored, manipulated,reproduced, transmited and displayed. The society of the Spectacle wasdestined to embrace digital media.

2. Cinema Prepares Digital Media

Cinema not only plays a special role in the history of the computer.Since the late nineteenth century, cinema was also preparing us fordigital media in a more direct way. It worked to make familiar suchdigital concepts as sampling, random access, or a database -- in orderto allow us to swallow the digital revolution as painlessly as possible.Gradually, cinema taught us to accept the manipulation of time andspace, the arbitrary coding of the visible, the mechanization of vision,and the reduction of reality to a moving image as a given. As a result,today the conceptual shock of the digital revolution is not experiencedas a real shock -- because we were ready for it for a long time.

2.1. Sampling Any digital representation consists from a limited number ofsamples, a fact which is usually illustrated by a grid of pixels -- asampling of two-dimensional space. Cinema prepares us for digitalmedia because it is already based on sampling -- the sampling of time.Cinema samples time twenty four times per second. All that remains isto take this already discrete representation and to quantify it. But this issimply a mechanical step; what cinema accomplished is a much moredifficult conceptual break from the continuous to the discrete.

Cinema is not the only media technology which, emergingtowards the end of the nineteenth century, is dependent on a discreterepresentation. If cinema samples time, fax transmission of images,

starting in 1907, samples two-dimensional space; even earlier, firsttelevision experiments (Carey, 1875; Nipkow, 1884) already involvesampling of both. [3] However, reaching mass popularity much earlier


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than these other technologies, cinema is the first to make the principleof a discreet representation of the iconic public knowledge.

2.2. Random Access Another key quality of digital media is random access. Forinstance, once a film is digitized and loaded in the computer memory,any frame can be accessed equally fast. Therefore, if film samples timebut still preserves its linear ordering (subsequent moments of time

become subsequent frames), digital media abandons this "human-centered" representation altogether in order to put time fully under ourcontrol. Time is mapped onto two-dimensional space, where it can bemanaged, analyzed and manipulated more easily.

Such mapping was already widely used in nineteenth-centurycinema machines. The Phenakisticope, the Zootrope, theZoopraxiscope, the Tachyscope, and Marey's photographic gun were allbased on placing a number of slightly different images around theperimeter of a circle. Even more striking is the case of Thomas Edison'sfirst cinema apparatus. In 1887 Edison and his assistant, WilliamDickson, began experiments to adopt the already proven technology of aphonograph record for recording and displaying of motion pictures.Using a special picture-recording camera, tiny pinpoint-size

photographs were placed in spirals on a cylindrical cell similar in size tothe phonography cylinder. A cylinder was to hold 42,000 images, each sosmall (1/32 inch wide) that a viewer would have to look at themthrough a microscope. [4] The storage capacity of this medium wastwenty-eight minutes -- twenty-eight minutes of continuous time takenapart, flattened on a surface and mapped into a two-dimensional grid.In short, time was prepared to be recreated, manipulated and reordered.

3. Simulation

It won't be difficult to show how cinema has been preparing other

concepts associated with digital media, but, given the limitations ofspace, I want to focus on the most important one: simulation.

Digital media makes commonplace the simulation of non-existent realistic worlds. Examples include military simulators, VirtualReality, computer games, television ("virtual sets" technology), and, ofcourse, special effects of Hollywood films such as "Terminator 2,""Jurassic Park" and "Caspar." These latter films seem to demonstratethat, given enough time and money, almost anything can be simulated.Yet, they also exemplify the triviality of what at first may appear to be anoutstanding technical achievement -- the ability to fake visual reality.For what is faked, of course, is not reality but photographic reality,reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what digitalsimulation has (almost) achieved is not realism, but only photorealism-- the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of realitybut only its film image. This image exists outside of our consciousness,on a screen -- a window of limited size which presents a still imprint ofa small part of outer reality, filtered through the lens with its limiteddepth of field, filtered through film's grain and its limited tonal range.It is only this film-based image which digital technology has learned tosimulate. And the reason we think that this technology has succeededin faking reality is that cinema, over the course of the last hundredyears, has taught us to accept its particular representational form asreality.

What is faked is only a cinematic image. Once we came to accept amoving photograph as reality, the way to its future simulation was

open. Conceptually, digitally simulated worlds already appeared withthe first films of the Lumieres and Georges Melies in the 1890s. It is they

who invented digital simulation.


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It is hundred years later and the simulation techniques are fullyperfected. And it is becoming clear that it is ultimately moreadvantageous to simulate the world than to film it directly. A simulatedimage can represent non-existent reality, it can be endlessly modified, itis more manageable, and so on. Because of this our society will try touse digital simulations whenever possible.

Cinema, which was the key method to represent the worldthroughout the twentieth century, is destined to be replaced by digital

media: the numeric, the computable, the simulated. This was thehistorical role played by cinema: to prepare us to live comfortably in theworld of two-dimensional moving simulations. Having played this rolewell, cinema exits the stage. Enters the computer.

NOTES

1. Charles Eames, A COMPUTER PERSPECTIVE: BACKGROUND TOTHE COMPUTER AGE (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1990), 18.

2. Eames, 120.

3. Albert Abramson, ELECTRONIC MOTION PICTURES. A HISTORYOF TELEVISION CAMERA (Berkeley: University of California Press,1955), 15-24.

4. Charles Musser, THE EMERGENCE OF CINEMA: THE AMERICANSCREEN TO 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 65.

cinema and digital medialev manovich[1]

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